Halloween Discussion Forums, Costumes, Horror!

Murfreesboro wrote: That's funny, about how accustomed your have become to the Spanish term. And interesting about the translation. I have studied several languages, but not Spanish. I hear it is very subtle the longer you study it. That is, I have always heard that French starts out hard and gets easier, whereas Spanish starts out easy and gets harder.

Can't speak to the French, but while working for Uncle Sam I was required to get some learnin' in German. Talk about some tough language to understand!!

I learned just enough German to get myself in trouble. The trouble with German is....Speak it for 5 minutes and you have an incredible urge to invade Poland!

Not only are there subtleties in Spanish, the actual meaning of a word may differ from country to country. Weird but true!

But Deutsche is such a calm, soothing language.

Like an impact hammer dropped in a garbage disposal.

Our family gravitates toward German. I had a German grandmother, and one of my aunts lived in Germany for three years. My husband had a German father. Even though my FIL was born in MO, he spoke nothing but German for the first six years of his life. And we attend my husband's Lutheran church. Our older son did his study abroad in Germany and is fluent in the language. He keeps going back over there. I studied it for four years in college but was never really fluent. I think you have to spend time there for that to happen.

I know that, when my husband and I were singing in Concert Choir at Vandy, we sometimes had to sing in German. That language takes a ton of energy to pronounce correctly, especially for Southerners!

I do know that, when I had to take a year of Anglo-Saxon during grad school, Old English was easier for me than for many other students because I had studied German. Ditto Chaucer, who writes in Middle English.

Well they say English is a Germanic language, but danged if I can tell!

Funny thing is that according to the US Census, Germans make up the single largest group of white people in the country.

I would have thought the Irish might have given them a run for their money on that statistic.

As for the kinship between English & German--you can definitely tell if you ever study the older forms of English. Modern German is inflected, and not much modern English is, although we still have some inflection, like child/children, deer/deer, or the "apostrophe s" we use to show possession (which indicates that the original "e" has been left out).

I tried learning German once. The joke was that German was really just "bad English"

Some words are the same in German, and many are similar. I think the flow of the language is quite similar.

But yes, it does sound like a lot of coughing and hacking involved to pronounce certain words.

I think Italian is a pretty Language, and I also think Japanese is.

I think I have German in my family. My last name is of German origin. Kind of ironic considering I'm also part Jewish.

Your Jewish ancestry may have been German. I have one German Jew on the family tree. It's not really ironic at all. There were lots of Jews in Germany before the Nazis, and I think most of them identified strongly as German.

I was thinking again about the English/German connection after I posted. I neglected to mention obvious connections in vocabulary. If you hear a German person say, "Komm hier," you will certainly understand "Come here." And there are words that have changed pronunciation in English, but not in German. Night/Nacht, for instance. If we still pronounced the word "night" the way Chaucer did, it would sound a lot like "nacht." Ditto "light," which once sounded exactly like German "licht." German doesn't really have "silent letters," but English is full of them today. We weren't always.

Actually Murf, my Jewish ancestors came over from Russia. The German came from my Dad's side of the family, and the Jewish came from my Mother. My Mother's Father had a German sounding last name, but I think he was actually Armenian. It was my Grandmother's Father who was a full blooded Orthodox Jew.

You're definitely correct about the pronunciation and similarities in German. It's not that hard of a language when you get used to "gargling glass" as you might put it.

Ah, well, yes, I think there were once a lot of Jews in Russia as well, and then they got kicked out. Isn't that what Fiddler on the Roof is ultimately about?

"Gargling glass"--

Murfreesboro wrote:I would have thought the Irish might have given them a run for their money on that statistic.

As for the kinship between English & German--you can definitely tell if you ever study the older forms of English. Modern German is inflected, and not much modern English is, although we still have some inflection, like child/children, deer/deer, or the "apostrophe s" we use to show possession (which indicates that the original "e" has been left out).

The Irish come in second. Only slightly ahead of the English.

Yea you can see the connection in German/English if you read Beowulf in old English.

Some people think the story is about a real creature similar to Bigfoot. I read the movie Predator was heavily influenced by Beowulf. Silly me thinking it was heavily influenced by STEROIDS! LOL!

I never thought about Beowulf in connection with Predator, but maybe so.

Back when I was doing it, you had to take a year of Anglo-Saxon in order to get a Ph.D. in English. The whole second semester was spent translating Beowulf. I made it a point to memorize the first twelve lines and can still rattle them off.

BTW, there was a CGI movie based on Beowulf a few years back. I actually liked it quite a lot. They changed the story line somewhat to make it more psychological and more coherent (that is, one continuous story, not two or three fragments). I thought they did a good job of re-imagining it for a modern audience. They also included some Old English in the scene where the older Beowulf is having a banquet to commemorate his youthful feats, and the Scop is reciting.